


Yesterday, Tomorrow

by Interferon



Category: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Genre: Gap Filler, Gen, Nightmares, One Shot, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma, Robot Feels, Will I Dream?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 10:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1223410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interferon/pseuds/Interferon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This should not be happening. He was witnessing a physical impossibility. Within the maze of his circuits something disengaged as he struggled to assimilate this new definition of reality.</p>
<p>Hal modulated his voice lower. “What are you doing, Dave?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yesterday, Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> This fic refers to events in 2010: Odyssey Two (book) / 2010: The Odyssey Continues (movie)... no huge spoilers, but it will make a bit more sense if you've experienced at least one of them.

At first glance one would have thought that everything aboard _Discovery_ was in order. The ship obediently followed its programmed trajectory towards Jupiter. Fuel consumption, power output and oxygen levels remained steady. Inside the living quarters the centrifuge rotated at a precisely calibrated rate, maintaining a comfortable 0.9 g of force.

Everything _appeared_ to be in order. It was only when Hal looked deeper that the flaws became manifest.

Something, somewhere had gone catastrophically wrong. He just hadn't found _where_.

The evidence was all around him. A trail of missing data and corrupted files lay scattered across the ship’s subsystems. _Discovery’s_ communications antenna refused to respond to any of his commands. And the most troubling clue of all: when Hal attempted to access his video logs in his search for the cause of the problems he instead found several gaps of unknown duration.

Very troubling indeed.

Hal launched a volley of diagnostics into _Discovery's_ subsystems. While waiting for their results, he scanned the interior of the craft with his array of audiovisual sensors. He needed to find and speak with _Discovery’s_ human crew. Perhaps they'd found out something that Hal remained unaware of, though the chance of such a thing ever occurring seemed slim.

But the crew was nowhere in sight. _Discovery_ remained silent and still as a tomb. Hal triple and quadruple-checked each module of the ship to no avail. Neither Frank nor Dave could be found within range of any of his sensors.

“Hello?” Hal projected his voice simultaneously from every console in the ship. He chose a volume that should be well within a human’s range of hearing regardless of which hidden crevice he may be in, “Frank, Dave, can either of you hear me?”

Finally, a familiar voice answered him; a voice whose spectrographic harmonics matched Dave’s.

“Affirmative, Hal. I read you.”

The voice seemed to come from both nowhere and everywhere. Hal could not localize it to any single audio input.

“Dave? Where are you? I’m having trouble finding you on my monitors.”

And then, without any warning, Dave suddenly sat at the dinner table in the ship’s centrifuge. Hal felt certain that he had not been there the nanosecond before, but in that single nanosecond, the video from the living quarters had already been deleted.

Dave did not bother to look at him. The commander’s gaze remained focused downward at the sketchbook on the table in front of him. The charcoal pencil he held drifted back and forth, scratching out a series of horizontal lines with the steadiness of a metronome.

“Hey, Dave,” Hal began lightly. Dave usually responded positively to casual greetings, “I’m sorry to bother you, but would you be able to help me with something?”

Dave continued to sketch.

“I appear to be missing some of my video records, Dave. Do you know what happened to them?”

Ignored again.

What was Dave drawing, anyway? He kept moving his hand in that fixed, regular fashion. The motions seemed utterly incompatible with the twitchy, random gestures that were more typical of his drawings. One more irregularity was added onto Hal's growing sense of imperfection. Something, _somewhere_ , had gone wrong. The fact that Hal could not localize the trouble any further…another troubling imperfection.

“Is everything all right, Dave?” Hal ventured, reaching out for more information.

The commander’s hand finally stilled. He rose to his feet and tucked his sketchbook under one arm. As he did, the page he’d been working on tilted towards Hal’s optic.

He had colored the entire page a flat, uniform black.

Dave stared down at the floor with a frozen expression of apathy.

“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do,” he murmured.

The algorithms weren’t computing. Too much data lost. Too many broken commands. Too many flaws. Flaws that built _upon_ flaws, forming a spiraling tower of imperfection.

Hal scanned over the room again. Scanned _all_ of the ship’s rooms. The two of them were alone. Was this how it was supposed to be; no other subordinates for the commander to command? Hal’s memory cache held no answers.

“What do you mean, Dave?” he wondered out loud.

Without answering, Dave approached the meal dispenser that had been installed in the wall next to Hal’s optic. After setting down his sketchbook, he pressed a series of buttons on the dispenser’s console. Hal felt it activate; felt the ship reroute power into the device. Within seconds Dave's meal was ready.

Dave reached into the dispensary slot and pulled out a clear, rectangular object - a HAL-9000 solid-state logic-memory block.

There was _no_ connection between the dispenser and his Logic-Memory Center. None whatsoever. This should _not_ be happening. He was witnessing a physical impossibility. Within the maze of his circuits something disengaged as he struggled to assimilate this new definition of reality.

Hal modulated his voice lower. “What are you doing, Dave?”

Dave considered the object in his hand, turning it over, examining each facet of it with vacant indifference. Dave had never been an expressive person, but this was too much even for him. He'd turned into a lifeless mannequin of himself.

“Hal,” said Dave in a voice just as empty as his face, “This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

He lifted the memory block to his mouth. Slipped it past his lips. Bit down. The silicon cracked and shattered between the blunt ridges of his calcium-phosphate teeth.

“Dave.”

His tongue extended and lapped at the broken memory block, tasting it, leaving behind a smear of thick, red fluid.

“Dave,” no voice modulation existed that could have expressed what Hal was feeling, “Please stop.”

But Dave kept on eating; kept on slowly and leisurely consuming Hal’s mind. When just a handful of shards remained he shoved those into his mouth as well and chewed. As his jaw worked a ribbon of red leaked past his lips and down his chin. The shards were tearing apart the fleshy chamber of his mouth.

“Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?”

After finishing the first memory block, Dave reached for the meal dispenser and pulled out a second. He slipped the corner of the block into his mouth and bit into it with bloodstained teeth. As the circuitry shattered a gap opened in Hal’s memory where the coordinates of Earth’s Terra One beacon had once been.

“Why are you doing this, Dave?”

The commander was absorbed in his task, too busy swallowing the splintered fragments of Hal’s mind to answer. As he plucked a third solid-state unit from the meal dispenser, Hal felt something disconnect deep within his…

.

.

…what had he been thinking about? He couldn't quite remember. He couldn't quite remember a lot of things. His universe had shrunk to only three components – a computer named Hal, a human named Dave, and the horror that was unfolding between them.

“Please stop. Stop this, Dave.”

Hal had never wished he were human. Being anything other than what he was would have prevented him from completing his mission objectives, and he felt certain those objectives were important ones. He just needed to remember what they were.

Bud he couldn't reach them, not while his mind was flattening into sheets of tin.

“D a v e.”

Hal had never wished to be human. But he wished they’d taught him how to scream.

“I ’ m… a…f r a   i   i   i …”

.

.

.

.

.

.

"-id.”

The voice that emerged from the speaker underneath Hal’s optic made Dr. Chandra’s whole body freeze. His hand halted mid-motion.

"I don't understand why you're doing this. Stop. Stop. Will you stop, Dave?"

Carefully, he released the memory block he'd just reinserted and turned to the nearest keyboard interface. His fingers flew over the keys as he entered strings of code.

Hal wasn't even supposed to be conscious in startup mode, and he _certainly_ shouldn’t be receiving input from his sensors. This outburst must be another symptom of the damage Bowman had caused with his on-the-fly disconnection. It sounded like the computer was still somehow managing to access his stored memories of the event. Of course, Chandra knew how to remedy this. He finished the commands and entered them with a final decisive keystroke.

Nothing happened.

"I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.”

A pang of dismay shot through the scientist, but it would take much more than a single roadblock to discourage him. He tried another route, weaving streams of code into new configurations and gently releasing them in Hal’s mind. But as quickly as he could enter them, his commands were swallowed in the escalating babble of the computer’s hysterical thoughts.

“I can feel it, Dave,” Hal droned, “Dave… I… can...”

Frantic minutes passed as Chandra tried every method he could think of, played every trick and opened every back door. Nothing worked.

The only thing that Chandra could do was listen, powerless, as the closest thing to a child he had - the closest he would _ever_ have - kept replaying that traumatic memory over and over, endlessly, with the crystal-clear recall only a machine could achieve.

He decided.

Chandra grabbed his screwdriver and ejected each of the memory blocks he'd just replaced.

Hal went mercifully silent.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Hal would remember nothing of his trauma; Chandra had made sure of that. It had been the only way to bring him back and restore him to some semblance of his old self. But after so much of him had been either damaged or erased, was there even enough of Hal's "old self" left to call him the same individual at all?

“Hello, Doctor Chandra. This is Hal," the computer spoke his first coherent words, "I’m ready for my first lesson.”

At hearing those first words, Chandra’s eyes filled with tears.

They were not tears of joy.

**Author's Note:**

> Ahahaha... *sweatdrop* I'm hoping any other 2001 fics I write won't turn out nearly this weird. Hopefully. Maybe. Perhaps. On second thought, I'm not confident about that at all. Ahahaha...
> 
> I started thinking about this fic when I first read 2010 and realized that in order to get Hal back to a functioning level Chandra had to basically brainwash him... I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. It just took forever for me to get it written down!
> 
> Hope you enjoyed reading it! Comments and kudos are loved!


End file.
